SAP IT Convergence is About Business Focused Integration

By |August 15th, 2011|

Enterprise SAP IT organizations pose a problem as they are focused on SAP and IT. They lose sight of their purpose, which is to promote the broader objectives of the enterprise. An SAP-centered IT organization's whole existence is about ensuring business benefit, focusing on enterprise goals, strategies, and objectives. Somewhere between the SAP sales cycle and the SAP go-live, the concept of business benefit gets lost and is never found again. By the time you go live with the SAP application, [...]

What are SAP Best Business Practices Anyway

By |March 7th, 2011|

Over the last couple months, I have seen a few posts debating the use of software “best business practices.” The basic takeaway is that if everyone uses the standard delivered “practices,” no one has competitive advantage. While this may be true for many software applications, two components of SAP make this idea misleading. Many of these commentators fail to recognize that SAP refers to different things as "best business practices." The key types of SAP best business practices involve the proc [...]

SAP System Vendor Project Success Criteria & Factors 5

By |November 29th, 2010|

This is the final post in the series on SAP project shared success criteria. Doing this entire topic justice has been more of a challenge than I had originally anticipated. At some point, I will put it all together in a PDF e-book. This series leaves you with a lot to digest but over the years these items generally make up the foundations for a very successful project that is able to transform your business. This series has been challenging but interesting and I am glad it is complete. In a few [...]

SAP Implementation is an Investment NOT an Event

By |July 12th, 2010|

A while back, I talked to a pair of executives who were trying to determine whether or not their SAP implementation cost was higher or lower than their competitors. They wanted benchmarks or some other way to know if they were in line with the marketplace. The CFO was worried that they might have paid way too much for their SAP implementation. After talking for a few minutes, they realized that they were looking at the question the wrong way. While they were asking about how their expenditure c [...]

Change Management Strategies and Knowledge Transfer Processes for a Successful SAP Project 1

By |June 24th, 2010|

Why SAP Process Understanding, Troubleshooting Ability, and Knowledge Transfer Techniques Are Missing in SAP or ERP Projects Because an ERP system such as SAP has a single database or a single instance of data, a full process chain of dependencies is developed. Every organizational function becomes dependent on the process steps before and after it, no matter what department or area is responsible (Kallinikos, 2004). Because of these dependencies, a data error is no longer contained in a single [...]

Striving for a Customer Focused Approach to Innovation 3 of 3

By |April 5th, 2010|

In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the current innovation paradigm. That paradigm consists mostly of two primary approaches: namely incremental innovation that looks more like continuous improvement, and a free-for-all that is more like chaos. We also looked at a third approach to innovation: leveraging existing marketing infrastructure to produce a future state narrative. That narrative acts as a future state blueprint for product or service development to move toward. Innovat [...]